Freezing for ‘unlove’: Declining fertility,heterosexual partnering and conflicting subjectivities among women pursuing social egg freezing in their 30s in Norway

Abstract

This article discusses so-called social egg freezing among women in Norway. The women, single and in their thirties, link the desire to freeze their eggs to challenges with heterosexual partnering and the lingering threat of becoming ‘desperate’ due to presumed declining fertility. I show that ‘desperation’ stands for impulses, desires, priorities and strategies, which are in conflict with an ideal feminine subjectivity – the ‘strong independent woman’ – who is gender equal, autonomous, rational and self-regulating. At the same time, normative coupledom based on ‘true love’ remains at the heart of the women’s idea of an optimal way of life. Drawing on feminist sociologist Eva Ilouz’ theorisation of the effects of late capitalism on heterosexual dynamics and relationships, I show how egg freezing is pursued in order to retain and improve one’s ability for what Illouz calls ‘unlove’: to avoid and escape substandard relationships and prioritise autonomy and self-empowerment over a desire for attachment. I contend that, although in some cases (and/or for some time) experienced as empowering and an enhancement of gender equality, egg freezing remains an individualised, and largely ineffective, response to conflicts and dilemmas stemming from gendered paradoxes of late capitalist intimate normativity, where norms of ‘true love’ coupledom come into conflict with an ideal subjectivity of radical autonomy. ‘Freezing for unlove’, thus, also highlights the ambiguous effects of an individualist neoliberal feminism, which fails to adequately address material gender differences, and to problematise adjustment to a male norm as a strategy for gender equality.

Introduction

It’s a super comfortable feeling in fact, in new relationships, not to be categorized as ‘woman over 35, desperate to have children’. It’s like: ‘No. No. Me, I have frozen my eggs. So, I don’t have to worry about that’. [. . .]

Ida was 35 when she had 18 of her eggs frozen and stored at a fertility clinic in a Norwegian city, a few months after the procedure was legalised in Norway as part of a comprehensive revision of the national Biotechnology Act in May 2020. For Ida, the legislative revision coincided with the abrupt break-up of a serious, cohabiting relationship, leaving her concerned about her fertility, future relationships and the possibility of having a nuclear family. The news about the 2020 revision arrived just as Ida and her ex were leaving each other and the apartment they had shared, packing boxes and waiting for the moving Van:

[B]oth our phones go «ping» and the two of us check and find a notification from VG ¹ saying ‘Biotech legislation altered, [women] in Norway can now freeze their eggs’ [. . .] And he looks at me and goes: ‘Perfect timing!’ [laughs]

Shortly after, Ida started the freezing process, and when we met, about 5 months later, she told me she was dating again, feeling empowered by her frozen eggs: ‘[I]t’s a very lovely feeling of freedom, to know that I’m in a position to break up with someone, without feeling that I may ruin things for myself’.

Ida joined an increasing number of women in Norway who, in the last decade, have paid for cryopreservation of their own unfertilised eggs (so-called ‘social’ or ‘elective’ egg freezing). Until the 2020 liberalisation, women in Norway had been travelling abroad to have their eggs frozen and stored for later use. Internationally, egg freezing has been on the rise since 2009, forming part of the growing transnational reproductive market (Lie and Lykke, 2017), which profits from the procreative desires of relatively financially privileged individuals, who are willing to go to great geographical, financial, emotional and ethical lengths to have children (Førde, 2017a, 2017b). Unlike most services in this market, however, social egg freezing is not a solution to infertility per se, as it caters to individuals presumed fertile (Van der Wiel, 2020). Rather, egg banking is often pitched by commercial providers as an empowerment strategy for highly educated middle-class women, liberating them from their temporal biology and setting them free from the conflict between mothering and career building in their 20s and 30s.

In this article, I offer the first empirical account of motivation for egg freezing in a Nordic country, where the combination of paid work and having and caring for children is no longer framed as problematic, rather it has become close to a taken-for-granted norm (Borchorst and Siim, 2008; Ellingsæter and Pedersen, 2013). Relative economic independence for mothers – preferably through paid work – has been promoted and facilitated by welfare state policies since the 1970s (Hernes, 1987) and such a gender equal welfare state has become an essential aspect of national self-understanding (Larsen et al., 2021). In countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia, difficulty in combining children and work has been documented as a crucial motive for egg freezing (Waldby, 2015). However, even outside the Nordic region, literature on women’s motivations for egg freezing finds that it is used as a tool for optimising one’s biographical project in a wider sense (Baldwin, 2019; Inhorn et al., 2022; Van der Wiel, 2015, 2020). More specifically, findings suggest contemporary dynamics in heterosexual partnering and relationships, rather than the challenge of balancing children and professional life, are the key challenges to which egg freezing is seen as a solution (Baldwin, 2019; Inhorn et al., 2022). As we shall see, such dynamics dominate the accounts of women in relatively gender equal Norway as well.

Methodology

The study presented here is based on ethnographic, multi-sited fieldwork conducted between January 2020 and October 2021. ² The 22 women participating in the research were recruited because they had considered, planned, initiated or completed a process of freezing their own eggs. ³

The majority of the women were in their thirties when recruited, and the median age was 36. Four were 26–29 years old. All had a Norwegian or Western European background, lived in urban areas in Norway, had completed higher education and had middle-class jobs. ⁴ All but one identified and lived as heterosexuals. A minority of five women were in stable relationships ⁵ when recruited to the study, while the majority either presented themselves as single (12) or were in new or undefined relationships (5). Two had a child at the time of recruitment; three gave birth during my fieldwork. The analysis that follows mainly draws on the section of the sample who identified as heterosexual, were 30 years or older, and who were not in a stable relationship when recruited to my study (17 of the 22 fall into this group).

All the women participated in semi-structured interviews, lasting between 75 and 150 minutes, taking place variously in the women’s homes, in a meeting room on my university campus, a hotel room and in one case, digitally via Zoom. Before and after each interview, we had additional informal communications either in-person, by telephone or by email (according to the participants’ wishes). During these exchanges, the women provided updates, approximately every 6 months, and in some cases more frequently. One woman invited me to accompany her on her second egg retrieval at a fertility clinic in Oslo, allowing me to observe the procedure.

Interview transcriptions and fieldnotes were analysed in accordance with Braun and Clarke’s (2006) prescription for a thematic analysis; a recursive process including transcription and repeated readings, coding, and identification, revision, definition and naming of recurring themes and patterns of meaning in the material. A selection of the themes produced by this process forms the base of the argument presented here.

Framework: Late modern heterosexual partnering and its puzzles in the Global North

In their article ‘Freezing for love: enacting “responsible” reproductive citizenship through egg freezing’, Carroll and Kroløkke (2018) contend that for their US informants ‘the allure of egg freezing was to uphold a particular, normative love story’ (p. 996), that is, to obtain a genetically based nuclear family within a romantic relationship. Scholars have documented how coupledom, individualisation notwithstanding, remains a key norm of late modern intimacy. Roseneil et al. (2020) argue about the contemporary European context that ‘being part of a couple is widely seen and felt to be an achievement, a stabilizing status characteristic of adulthood, indicative of moral responsibility and bestowing full membership of the community (p. 4)’. However, despite such a tenacious couple norm, more people than ever, including many women opting for egg freezing, struggle to form and maintain lasting relationships. Feminist sociologist Eva Illouz (2018), in the latest of her extensive work on the transformative effects of capitalism and modernity on emotions and romance, argues for the pertinence of perceiving these difficulties to form relationships as a form of negative sociality. Due to the increasingly commercialised functioning of the pursuit of intimacy and partnership, relational commitment is perceived as a potential threat to self-empowerment and preservation of self-interest, a threat which, according to Illouz, is addressed on an individual level by retaining the freedom to unlove; that is, freedom to not form bonds or to break them. Illouz describes unloving as a gendered phenomenon in the sense that it ascribes different strategies and priorities to men and women respectively. In simple terms, men preserve their interests and worth in the market by protecting their autonomy, often expressed as reluctance or even ‘phobia’ of being involved in a relational commitment. Women, on their side, preserve their self-worth, not by refusing to commit, but by scrutinising the extent to which they are satisfactorily valued in relationships, securing a certain reciprocity in terms of resources exchanged. For women too, withdrawing from relationships that do not confirm or enhance their perceived value is key to preservation of the self. However, a crucial gender difference remains, according to Illouz: Modern norms of intimacy enable men to achieve fulfilment and a sense of self-worth through uncommitted sexual relations or their public status, such as having a successful career. For women, however, a successful relationship is not just a cultural ideal; it is a social foundation for the self (Illouz, 2012), making them more motivated than men to prioritise commitment over autonomy.

In what follows, I will let Illouz’ analysis of the dynamics of late modern heterosexual relationality shed light on the motivations of women in Norway for egg freezing. I will discuss challenges of heterosexual partnering experienced by the women who participated in my research and argue that the pursuit of egg freezing can be understood as a way of dealing with gendered power imbalance and protecting one’s autonomy from the potential vulnerability of precarious fertility. Or in Illouz’ words: restore one’s power to ‘unlove’.

I will first discuss the disrupting effect of emerging fertility decline on gender relations and gendered subjectivities as experienced by the women. I will then attend more in depth to the perceived threats associated with such a disruption and how egg freezing was portrayed as a way of managing them. Finally, I will discuss egg freezing in relation to other possible strategies to address the dilemmas, before moving to a concluding discussion, which addresses some possible wider implications of ‘freezing for unlove’.

From ‘strong independent woman’ to ‘Bridget Jones’? – Fertility decline and disrupted gendered subjectivities

In line with other empirical studies cited above, the often complex motivations and justifications for pursuing egg freezing among the women who participated in my research centred on establishing and maintaining a stable heterosexual relationship while their fertility was presumably in decline, compared to the fertility of potential male partners. In our interview about her wish to freeze, 33-year-old architect, Anna, ⁶ brought up a humiliating and disturbing date in which gender asymmetry in dating and partnering related to fertility was addressed in an unusually blunt way:

I was on a date with a guy just after I turned 30. And it came up that I had just turned 30. [. . .] And obnoxious as he was [. . .]. He said straight to my face that ‘when girls turn 30, they have to have children, whereas when men turn 30, they can just go on partying and enjoying themselves’. It’s very unpleasant to acknowledge that there is some truth to it. And it’s fucking annoying.

‘Fucking annoying’, ‘unfair’, ‘infuriating’. Although grievances of this nature were usually uttered somewhat tongue-in-cheek (as if acknowledging that ‘biology’ has no morals or justice), many of the women expressed genuine distress about the gender-asymmetric effects of ageing and fertility. In her extensive study of egg freezing, Van der Wiel (2020) suggests the term precarious fertility to capture discourses, which are at once a justification for and an effect of reproductive technologies. By precariousness, in this context, Van der Wiel means ‘uncertainty, exposure to risk and vulnerability to the will or decision of others’. In my research findings, expressions of such emerging female precariousness related to fertility were most commonly evoked through the notion of ‘desperation’. A 33-year-old tech manager Rebekka said,

I fear being the personification of the semi-scary, desperate 30-something woman, who is just running around, hunting for someone who is just about good enough to be a partner and a father etcetera. I feel that . . . it’s a sort of . . . a frowned-upon, prejudged group. [. . .] It’s a bit Bridget Jones, you know. I’m so not keen on being seen as a member of that category.

As reflected in this quote, the ‘desperate 30-something woman’ is a well-established trope of pathetic femininity; the British novel and film character Bridget Jones ⁷ (Fielding, 1996) being chief among its many references in popular culture. Aspiring to little beyond finding a man to marry and start a family with, a project the ‘desperate’ woman vigorously (‘running around, hunting’), and perhaps ruthlessly (‘semi-scary’), pursues, suggests a traditionally valued, emotion-driven, dependent and vulnerable White, middle-class feminine subjectivity. Being ‘desperate’ in this sense is, as Rebekka contends, ‘frowned upon’ and ‘semi-scary’, giving rise to disdain and suspicion all around, not least among single childless women in their thirties themselves.

‘Desperation’ conflicted with what seemed to be the ideal subjectivity of the women I met, which can be summarised as a ‘strong independent woman’. The ‘strong independent woman’ is autonomous and self-regulated, rationally pursuing and protecting self-interest in the public realm as well as the private: very much in line with Wendy Brown’s (2015) ideal neoliberal subject. Higher education and a career were an undisputed part of this, as was the individualist imperative to ‘take control’ of the individual life and biography, identifying goals and taking action to ‘get what you want’. A 30-year-old lawyer Line explained how egg freezing fitted into such a scheme:

[. . .] It’s about taking control, like you buy an insurance in case something happens [. . .], and you save money to go on a holiday instead of taking an expensive loan. I’m not being entirely serious, this is something else! But you do some things to get where you want. This is me taking responsibility to get where I want.

Egg freezing was perceived to offer increased control in a precarious situation, although the women were aware that the frozen eggs could not guarantee future motherhood (due to factors such as uncertain egg quality, low IVF success rates and possible fertility issues unrelated to egg supply and quality). However, compared to romance and partnering, where ‘taking control’ was seen as neither possible nor desirable, egg freezing did provide a promise of management through rational choice, as an autonomous consumer subject in the market. Framed as both an expression and an enhancement of women’s agency, egg freezing resonated highly with the ‘strong independent woman’ subjectivity and the legalisation of egg freezing was often explicitly evaluated as progress for Norwegian gender equality. The ideological underpinnings for such an evaluation, understanding gender equality in terms of preservation of self-interest, self-management and effective consumption (including in the market of fertility services), however arguably resembled an individualist neoliberal feminism (Rottenberg, 2017) rather than the more collectively and politically oriented state feminism traditionally associated with the Nordic welfare state.

‘Desperation’ and destabilisation of the power to ‘unlove’

According to ‘strong independent woman’ feminism, gender equality also seemed to imply women conquering and holding a subject position traditionally held by men, including in the realm of heterosexual partnering. Rebekka’s account illustrates how this could play out. At 33, she had defined herself as single since breaking up with her high school boyfriend. In the meantime, she had had ‘a double-digit number’ of ‘Sunday boyfriends’, that is, undefined, usually short-lived, relationships, ending ‘either because you get bored or you find someone else’, according to Rebekka. She explained,

I think I was a bit like . . . I had the world at my feet, sort of, in my twenties. It felt like I had lots of time, and there [were] only possibilities. The ‘surely-something-better-around-the-next-corner’, ‘the-grass-is-greener’ sort of type.

In this self-portrayal, Rebekka had up until recently embodied Illouz’ ‘unloving player’ in the late modern relationship market, quickly forming and breaking relationships in a constant quest to optimise her possibilities. Most of the other women had similar histories of ‘unloving’, in some cases manifested as multiple broken-off relationships, in others as not engaging in long-term relationships at all. Although sometimes disparaged, as many of the women genuinely wished to be in a relationship, such unloving was mainly understood as a necessary consequence of proper self-regulation as a ‘strong independent woman’. Furthermore, the women problematised (sometimes even pathologised) a failure to ‘unlove’ in due course, for example, by remaining in an unsatisfactory relationship or pursuing someone who did not match their interest. The women generally understood such expressions of ‘desperation’ as flaws in themselves that had to be regulated and worked on. Echoing Illouz’ (2012) observation of how adverse effects of modern love are psychologised, a majority of the women had been to psychotherapy, read self-help books and/or performed other ‘work on themselves’, in order to help them regulate drives against ‘unloving’, such as fear of being alone, loyalty to an unsatisfactory partner, heartbreak or unreciprocated infatuation.

At 33, Rebekka felt she could no longer prioritise autonomy to the same degree without running the risk of becoming infertile without having found a partner. However, a greater interest in attachment and commitment could expose her as vulnerable, unattractive or pathetic (‘desperate’), reducing her likelihood of finding a partner and maintaining a balanced relationship.

This exact dilemma was a key driver behind interest in egg freezing among the research participants. In the following sections, I will discuss examples of how such an intensified conflict between the desire to be in a relationship and the peril of ‘desperation’ could play out, and how egg freezing offered a promise of relief. I will discuss two classes of perceived threats to the ‘strong independent woman’ subjectivity: destabilisation of one’s power position vis-a-vis specific men and failure to protect the ‘strong independent woman’ from destabilising internal desires and motivations.

‘The power balance gets a bit uneven’: Restoring gender symmetry in relationships

Among the participants, an axiomatic adverse effect of ‘desperation’ was that it made one seem too available and thus reduced one’s attractiveness. This aligns with the gendered market logic of dating and relationships (Illouz, 2012, 2018), in which women’s value is far more dependent on their ability to manage availability than is the case for men (Bergström, 2022).

Reduced attractiveness, and therefore fewer options, weakens one’s position in potential relationships, and makes one vulnerable and possibly dependent. A 36-year-old marketing manager Ida articulated this with very explicit reference to power:

[T]he power balance may get a bit uneven. If I had entered this [relationship] being in a hurry, like ‘you and me, we need to start a relationship because [I don’t have many fertile years left]’ . . . It gets a bit messy.

This was where Ida saw her egg freezing as a game changer:

But now [. . .] I have a guarantee that . . . If I don’t fall in love with him, if there is something that is not right for me, I can break up with him. I don’t have the ‘Oh, but I can’t break up with him, because if I do, I won’t have time to have children. So, I will just have to put up with it, whatever it is’. [. . .]

The backdrop for Ida saying this was her prolonged hesitation to break up with her previous partner, with whom she had hoped to have a baby. Not feeling properly seen and appreciated by her partner, she felt compelled to leave him. Relieved to be out of the relationship, the decision nonetheless caused her great concern, as she was 35 at the time and, thus, ran the risk of not having time to find a new partner while she was still fertile. Egg freezing, in Ida’s experience, eliminated this concern in new relationships and could restore gender-symmetric access to ‘unloving’ and thereby a balance of power.

A 36-year-old corporate manager Eva provided an example of how egg freezing untangled the pursuit of a child from any decision to ‘unlove’ and strengthened her position in an existing relationship. Eva and her partner of many years had been trying to have a child for 4 years, involving multiple unsuccessful IVF cycles and several miscarriages. The hardships of this process brought them into a crisis, and Eva’s partner had moved out, declaring a conditioned intent to return. His conditions, however, implied what Eva saw as unfair demands on her. Eva decided to freeze some of her unfertilised eggs, without informing her partner, in order to relieve some of her immense stress. She explained that her motive was to take the issue of declining egg quality ‘out of the equation’:

I felt as if the possibility [of having children] would just perish if we didn’t sort things out. And I felt that as an additional pressure on the relationship. And maybe . . . that I could possibly end up putting up with things that are not ok just because . . . I just feel that I so badly want it to work out, for us to be a family and have children.

Her partner, being male, could expect to have children for ‘another 15 years if he likes’ and so could appraise the relationship without considering future parenthood. Eva saw that having 20 unfertilised eggs frozen in the fertility clinic helped her acquire the same options. In turn, this allowed her greater powers of self-assertion and avoided her ‘putting up with things that are not ok’ in order to keep her partner. In Eva’s view, egg freezing was a way of taking control. In Illouz’ terms, she regained an equal capacity to ‘unlove’ and could again prioritise autonomy and self-interest, undisturbed by the weakening effects of female precarious fertility.

‘The strong independent woman’ versus ‘the princess dream’ – Protecting the autonomous subject against feminised ‘desperation’

I have discussed above some examples in which egg freezing created a sense of empowerment in relations with potential and present partners, as it restored a (more) equal capability for ‘unloving’. At the same time, there was a perceived risk to an autonomous subjectivity that was ultimately oriented not towards one’s relation to others (partners), but rather to oneself. ‘Desperation’ in this sense was portrayed as a force of motivation in conflict with one’s true interests and desires. This could have effects resembling what Baldwin (2019) calls panic partnering, that is, settling for a suboptimal partner. In the quote above, Rebekka mentioned ‘hunting for someone just about good enough’. Similarly, Siri, a 38-year-old TV-producer, explained that desire to secure her powers of rational judgement and strategy was key to her pursuit of egg freezing:

That was the main reason I did this. That I didn’t want to be . . . suddenly feel desperate about it. And choose a guy who was ‘just fine’ and had all his limbs intact (both laughing).

In these examples, the risk was to a large extent portrayed in terms of the same market logic, as ‘settling for less’, or failing to manage one’s resources and interests in order to get the best outcome possible. In other accounts, a similar, less obvious risk was highlighted: that one went looking for something qualitatively different than the optimal partner.

A 33-year-old Anna’s perspective illustrates this point. Prompted partly by the legalisation on egg freezing, and partly by the breakdown of her dating life due to Covid-19 pandemic measures during 2020 and 2021, Anna decided to freeze her eggs. This was mostly, as she said, to ‘calm herself down’ in a period where she was frustrated by a lack of progress in finding a partner. Her visit to the fertility clinic, however, brought about a dramatic change in her prospects. Her anti-müllerian hormone (AMH) ⁸ test showed low levels, suggesting an imminent premature menopause and very low chances of a successful egg freezing cycle. At this point, continuing dating as she had (‘pretend nothing has happened’) seemed to Anna both difficult and ‘unwise’, as it could have unwanted consequences. She explained,

What I want is to meet boys on Tinder and be relaxed! And . . . open and not stressed out with the issue of children. [. . .] [Knowing that I am approaching menopause] I feel like I would . . . Yeah, meeting someone I liked, I would probably not dare to spell the question out, but I would probably start fretting about having children after a few months. Despite not even wanting to.

Anna feared that the inevitable ‘desperation’ stemming from her knowledge of her imminent menopause had the potential to disturb her sense of self and lure her into choices that might harm her. Interestingly, she highlighted the perils of pursuing a partner and children at the same time. A generation ago, these two objectives were expected to be intimately linked, but in the minds of Anna and other participants, the two should not be pursued simultaneously (see Brown and Patrick (2018) for similar sentiments among American women freezing eggs). The key risk imagined seemed to be the instrumentalisation of partnering; pursuing the relationship for reproduction rather than for ‘love’. Anna explained,

Maybe you don’t listen to your own feelings. The guy might be really nice and good, but you’re not actually in love, you just want a child.

Although the unethical aspects of using another person as a means to an end was also mentioned, the problem highlighted was in fact more often how such instrumentality could harm the woman herself. Entering or remaining in an instrumental relationship (often referred to as ‘relationships of convenience’) was deemed many of the women to be the absolute worst possible outcome of ‘desperation’. Such a relationship, of course, does not fulfil contemporary cultural expectations and norms (Illouz, 2012, 2018; Roseneil et al., 2020), and as such, it is not curious that the women saw them as undesirable. However, the perceived perils seemed to go beyond the loss of an ideal relationship: some of the women expressed a fear of putting their subjectivity at risk, with serious discomfort, even mental health problems, as possible consequences, shedding light on the interplay between ‘love’ and self-management.

A 31-year-old Liv, an economist with two Master’s degrees, provides a very clear illustration of this point. In our exchanges, Liv was very vocal about her commitment to the ideal of autonomy and self-management (as it happens, she repeatedly referred to herself as ‘a strong independent woman’). This had not always been so. Her first – and so far only – long-term relationship had been, at least partly, motivated by the urge to have a family. Liv grew increasingly unhappy in the relationship, as she felt her partner did not match ‘who she really was’, emotionally and intellectually. Ambivalent about ending it because she worried about losing her chance to have ‘the package’ – marriage and children. Liv felt ‘trapped’ to the extent of developing anxiety and insomnia, which only abated once she ended the relationship. In our interview, she referred to this experience as something of a trauma, shaping and informing her present attitudes and choices, among them freezing her eggs. With 30 eggs in the bank, she felt she could meet men without the issue of children in mind at all, which was extremely important to her:

I don’t want to go out looking for the father of my children. [. . .] I don’t feel like running around town with that perspective. [. . .] I want to find a playmate, where . . . who is triggered by my adventurousness, and where there is no filter.

According to Liv, projecting imaginaries of having children into potential relationships, what she referred to as ‘the filter’, would disturb the quest for the ‘playmate’ she truly needed and wanted. Any desire she carried for a family life (‘the princess dream’ in Liv’s terms) should ideally be separated from the process of establishing a relationship, as it posed a fundamental threat to her true agenda, which was driven by her adventurousness, and ‘an extreme desire for freedom’. Only when her ‘own’ desire was satisfied, she felt, could the issue of children safely come up.

What I find especially interesting here is the division Liv makes between what she saw as her true subjectivity, the adventurous strong independent woman, and the impulses and desires pertaining to ‘the princess dream’; desires she was struggling to keep at bay. The gendered character of the princess metaphor is, of course, striking, as are the feminine connotations of the internal drives Liv feared and attempted to control; the need for attachment and security. Conversely, the ones she valued and strived to protect: her autonomy and transcendence (‘adventurousness’) have a distinct masculine saturation. To some degree, Liv herself explicitly gendered the different aspects of her subjectivity: ‘I have become a boy’ she said, chuckling, at one point in our interview, while discussing her dating strategies and experiences, characterised by quick withdrawals whenever she felt her autonomy threatened. She also declared, ‘I identify more with the sort of masculine desire for freedom’, you know ‘Oh, don’t hold me back, [don’t] drag me down’.

Liv’s account provides an unusually clear and articulate distinction between autonomy and any desire that could put it at risk. This conflict was present in most of the women’s responses, as was the assumed normative superiority of prioritising autonomy, even when it hurt, and the corresponding pathetics of giving in to other needs and desires – ‘desperation’.

‘It makes me feel dismal’: Persistent ‘desperation’ and the limitations of ‘freezing for unlove’

I have, so far, showed that the women portrayed egg freezing as a tool in their struggle to protect their autonomous and self-managing ‘true self’ from a feminised ‘neediness’ and irrationality. We could also say that rational control of one’s body and reproduction became a way of compensating for the pervasive uncertainty and vulnerability experienced in romantic life.

For some participants, this worked ‘according to plan’, in the sense that frozen eggs kept ‘desperation’ at bay long enough for normative partnering to happen. Siri, quoted above, froze her eggs at age 38 after a partner left her unexpectedly, in order to stay relaxed, keep optimising her options and prevent herself from ‘settling for less’. Not long after our first meeting, she fell in love with a man meeting her requirements, with whom she recently had a baby. Ida, who enthusiastically claimed that egg freezing had removed her from the population of ‘woman of 35, desperate to have children’, shared this optimistic report by email a year after freezing her eggs:

Things are good! I’m in a new stable relationship with a truly great guy. No children in the horizon yet, but as we know that will go as it goes. [. . .] [The frozen eggs] make me feel like I have time to really get to know him. And if it doesn’t work out, it’s not the end of the world

Thus, although aware that egg freezing could not guarantee future fertility, some of the women did experience it as having the power to manage ‘desperation’. This limited emphasis on the actual efficiency of egg freezing as fertility preservation underlines my argument that dealing with ‘unlove’ was a more prominent motive for egg freezing than dealing with fertility per se. Among the some of the research participants, the impetus for egg freezing was affective rather than bodily or biological.

In other cases, though, egg freezing was not experienced to have such an affective effect. This could be because the body itself evaded rational control, for example, the freezing process was unsuccessful, but also because even with frozen eggs, fertility was still perceived as precarious, time bound ⁹ and ‘desperation’ inevitable.

Such experiences led some of the women to consider another form of assisted reproductive technology (ART): donor conception entailing solo motherhood, as an alternative route out of the dilemma. Along with egg freezing, government funded assisted donor conception for single women became available in Norway in 2020, and this – unsurprisingly – increased the attention paid to solo motherhood as an option among my informants. ¹⁰ Most of the women saw it as an alternative that should be considered. ¹¹ Although one could imagine solo motherhood by choice as the ultimate act of a ‘strong independent woman’, most saw it as a suboptimal solution, both for the child and for the woman herself. Being single, although preferred over a substandard relationship, was never held up as an ideal, and often associated with sorrow and defeat. Even for these women, success with love and relationships remained a social foundation for the self (Illouz, 2012). Neither a child, a successful career nor less committed relationships could replace it.

Nonetheless, experiencing that the dilemmas prevailed, some of the women saw continued – or even intensified – prioritising of autonomy, with the risk of remaining single as the ‘least worst’ way of dealing with the ‘desperation’ of their thirties. Publishing editor Ellen considered freezing her eggs at 35, after the collapse of a brief, but intense relationship, which had raised her hopes of having a family. After a thorough process of research, she decided not to. She deemed the procedure too demanding, emotionally, physically and financially, compared to its highly uncertain and limited potential benefits. ¹² At our interview, Ellen was approaching 36 and evaluated what she saw as her remaining options: having a child on her own or reconciling herself to a childless life. To continue actively searching for a partner with whom to establish a family seemed possible for a few more years, but highly unappealing at this point in her life:

I really don’t like the idea of desperately having to finding a partner while I’m still fertile. It makes me feel dismal, in fact.

Ellen explained that as a childless woman in her late thirties, it was nearly impossible to escape the position as ‘desperate’. Thus, she was drawn to an extreme form of ‘unloving’: just staying away from dating until she was clearly beyond her fertile age. After 42, she imagined, her childlessness would be a given, and she could strive to resume the ideal subjectivity, and again meet men on ‘un-desperate’ and, thus, more equal terms.

Concluding remarks

According to my data, growing interest in egg freezing among women in their 30s in Norway mainly relates to challenges in intimate life. In fact, most of my informants emphatically denied that their interest in egg freezing had anything to do with work or careers. As noted above, motives surrounding partnering and romance have been found to dominate in other contexts too. Yet the women’s near-complete elimination of career concerns from the equation must be understood in relation to the political and ideological prioritising of paid work for women in Nordic welfare states, as well as my informants’ relatively privileged position within such a state as middle class, urban, White, heterosexual and highly educated women. In many ways, they are exceptionally empowered and ‘gender equal’ women by global and historical comparison, and also largely understood themselves as such. As I have argued, commitment to gender equality in a general sense was key to the women’s subjectivity, and egg freezing played into this narrative as an extension of gender equality into the realm of fertility and, thus, romance and partnering, compensating for the effects of biological gender difference.

Resonating with their claim and desire for equality, the women resisted the role and strategies Illouz identifies as prescribed to heterosexual women in relationships within late modern capitalist societies. When ‘desperation’ entered and threatened to weaken their power to ‘unlove’, rather than changing strategy, the women sought egg freezing to circumvent the effects of the materiality of their female bodies. Hence, rather than being a way of preserving a romantic ideal of love, as has been argued (Carroll and Kroløkke, 2018), egg freezing can perhaps better be understood as an acknowledgement of its inherent challenges, and a way of dealing with its contradictory norms. I would argue, moreover, that egg freezing is not only an example of how taking responsibility for the future makes up a new modality of neoliberal and gendered technologies of the self, as Rottenberg (2017) argues. It is also sought as a here-and-now-solution to a present threat; that of ‘desperation’.

‘Desperation’, as discussed in this article, can be said to stand for desires, motivations and relationships that cannot be accommodated by the rational autonomous subject that the women associated with a feminist imperative. When problematising such feminism, I certainly do not mean to argue against individual autonomy as a legitimate feminist claim, or to moralise over women’s resistance to a gendered division of reproductive functions in heterosexual dynamics. However, I do contend that ‘freezing for unlove’ should be understood as an individualised medicalised response to gendered paradoxes in contemporary neoliberal capitalist culture and society. ‘Freezing for unlove’ thus also highlights the ambiguous effects of an individualist neoliberal feminism, which fails to adequately address material gender differences, and to problematise adjustment to a male norm as a strategy for gender equality. Moreover, the case illuminates how neoliberal capitalist norms for intimate life come into conflict with each other; ‘masculine’ individualist norms of radical autonomy collide with the romantic-capitalist construct of ‘true love’. While this article discusses how such contradictions can cause distress and an urge for individualised ‘solutions’ among relatively privileged Nordic women in their thirties, their roots and effects go far beyond the experiences and strategies of this population.